Michelangelo

IT IS well that biography, if it must be written in the manner of the novel — as Mr. Lerman’s Michelangelo is partly — should be written for the young, for youth in the expected audience is a powerful encouragement to the indispensable virtue of objectivity in the writer. Mr. Lerman resorts at times to the so-called fictional method neither to bridge gaps in his information, which is solid and thorough, nor to psychiatrize his subject beyond what it is possible to know, but simply to enliven occasional aspects of the truth for readers of high school age. Here, as in his Leonardo da Vinci, the author thoroughly respects these readers. He gives them the story straight, with generous citation of contemporary sources, never writing down, never shirking an essential part of the history of the confused, tumultuous decades through which Michelangelo lived, and attacking even the aesthetic problem — the problem of making pictures and sculptures individually exciting — by a combination of copiously factual discussion with the irresistible enthusiasm of the really first-rate teacher. One result is a book ostensibly for the young for which a great many of their non-specialist elders will be grateful. Another result is a perception in the reader that a good many latter-day biographies ostensibly for adults would have been immeasurably better for everybody if they had been deliberately written to beguile and reward the young. W. F.